


Echoes From the Crossed Wires

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Background Relationships, Gen, Q overthinks things, Superpowers aren't always impressive, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-01
Updated: 2013-03-01
Packaged: 2017-12-04 00:48:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/704548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>If he needs a label – and really, why should he, when he hardly intends to inform anybody of the fact – then a more appropriate one would be a time-<i>viewer</i> (or, as it can feel, a time-voyeur). </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes From the Crossed Wires

Q would never describe himself as a time-traveller, simply because the noun – the title – carries far too many preconceptions with regard to the mechanics and the experience and the fictional parallels for him to address without sweeping the whole thing aside and rebuilding from the ground upwards.

If he needs a label – and really, why should he, when he hardly intends to inform anybody of the fact – then a more appropriate one would be a time- _viewer_ (or, as it can feel, a time-voyeur). He’s only a spectator to other people’s pasts, or their futures. He can’t step through, and he can’t interfere. In truth, it’s more of a distraction than anything else, every now and again upgrading to annoyance. Déjà vu all over again, for everybody but himself.

He’s not the Doctor either, despite some speculation he’s overheard in his department (he’s not as young as he looks but he takes offence at anything over nine centuries). The ‘visions’ – for want of a better word – remain locked to his location: no skipping merrily around the world for him. He lives in the here, if not always the now. It’s something he thinks would be fairly important to establish, were he to feel inclined towards divulging his little secret.

To be honest, breaching that secrecy very rarely occurs to him, because why would it? What would there be to gain? (No doubt everything, but really, trying to exploit past or future seems rather juvenile.) Who would believe him, and why would he want them to know something that will never have any impact on them?

(Never mind the small issue of what MI6 might decide to do with him if they ever found out.)

Down in Q Branch, he actually finds it rather comforting: glimpses of his predecessor, alive again and humming happily over his creations, or verbally sparring with agents. (It gives Q ample enough insight beforehand to hold his own the moment he meets 007 in present person.) Mourning becomes less of a gut-wrenching hollow void when you can still see your mentor as he was, from even before you met him.

Admittedly that aspect can be a drawback when applied more generally: being confined to HQ as he is, it’s rare for him to meet someone today he’s never seen before. In introductions it can give him the edge, and even a wonderful air of mysterious omniscience that he’s not ashamed to admit he delights in, but on the other hand, it can prove problematic in keeping track of the here and now. He might well know that Tanner once broke the coffee machine irreparably in a doomed attempt to chat up a member of HR, or that the former M had a truly glorious screaming match with her own predecessor in the privacy of her/his/their soundproofed office, but that doesn’t mean it’s something he should know about or bring up or which indeed has any impact on their present lives.

(He saw the explosion eat up her office and much more besides, from within and from the bridge; saw it again and again and continues to see it now, and no matter how many warnings or reminders blind him, he can never do anything about it. Again: the present is the only time where he can act, and when the moment finally came, he didn’t know until after the sirens were blaring.)

Bill can whistle everything ever written by Beethoven, but you wouldn’t know it unless you can hear him when nobody else can. He looks surprised when Q softly hums the opening of the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, and Q can hardly complain that it’s been stuck in his head since hearing it snaking its nonsensical way through the Men’s.

Usually, time-viewing is one of the most inane (mundane) superpowers Q could possibly imagine: its limitations are many, its advantages few, and its distractions uncountable.

Yes, he works in Intelligence; yes, this does technically give him an enormous edge over his co-workers. However, quite frankly Q resents the implication that he needs one – that he wouldn’t be the youngest quartermaster in MI6’s history by merit of his more ‘everyday’ skills, or that his ability to hack anything anywhere with enough time, equipment and hand-waving of laws is somehow second to knowing precisely who stole Jez’s sandwich from the communal fridge both yesterday and in two days’ time.

The history and future of HQ – not that he can tell the difference, the lighting doesn’t usefully alter and it turns out that people very rarely pepper their conversations with temporal qualifiers – is a fascinating curiosity, he won’t deny that. But that’s all it is.

(Raoul Silva walks past him in the corridor and for once he drops his adopted indifference and pins himself to the wall, until he realise it isn’t Silva, it’s still _Rodriguez_ , and later on he’ll watch the latter bait M just before his successor’s sabotage consumes the office, both long in the past by now.)

_That’s all it is._

Except when he lets himself linger on it for too long. Q’s curse always has been over-thinking things.

If possible he avoids the firing range like the plague; insists on being alone when he has testing to do, because time-shadows are surprisingly unsympathetic when it comes to whether or not their observer is wearing his ear-protectors yet. And it’s here that he can truly appreciate the weapons that his employers have forged: not the metal and gunpowder, but the people who wield them.

Should he ever want to, he can walk straight up to them; even stand right in front of them. Ghost-bullets can’t hurt him any more than phantom-explosions, after all. It’s a morbid thing to do, but there is that long stretch after mission codename Skyfall where all he can think otherwise is _not such a clever boy_ and the word _deceased_ over and over, and it might not be healthy but it is therapeutic in its own way. 

(After M’s funeral, he stands before Bond at point-blank range, if only to make it easier to look him in the eye.)

Q – the real Q – is there back in a very different Q Branch, walking through computers and making grand declarations about the future of weapons technology and precisely where they can stick their precious budget. He walks straight past a woman with her hair elaborated braided and her fingers constantly moving through the air to follow a touchscreen interface straight out of a sci-fi film (which one, Q doesn’t know, because he doesn’t have the bloody time these days). Predecessor and successor, Q assumes, and as nice as it might be to recognise her when she’ll walk through the doors, he knows that when it happens he won’t be able to stop himself comparing their visual ages.

And speaking of aging, he’ll admit in the privacy of his own thoughts that there’s something vaguely unnerving about Bond, in his status as the longest-serving Double O in MI6’s rather bloodthirsty history: Q had in a sense seen him a thousand times over before ever meeting him, and continues to take a moment every time he sees him in the present flesh, because Bond is _everywhere_ in this building.

(Q has no idea if Eve and Bond have already had sex or are going to have sex soon or will have sex months from now, and when you walk in on two of your coworkers’ time-shadows going at it on government property you don’t tend to try to gauge things like ages.)

(Also neither of them can keep quiet during meetings with Q’s new overlord, which is just bloody rude. You haven’t known awkward until trying to listen to orders over an orgasm only you can hear.) 

Nowhere is Bond’s ubiquitous presence more obvious than in the firing range: a thousand faces come and go, colleagues and agents testing and training away in the past or the future – some of the weapon designs make Q’s mouth water, he won’t deny it – but he can always count on seeing 007 at least once per trip. Which 007, he’s not so certain, although frequency breeds familiarity and Q can certainly compare and contrast them with the present model enough to form a rough timeline. 

He monitors the older shadows, because so long as they exist, then Bond still has some life to go. (Sometimes he watches them very closely indeed, trying to figure out how long they have left, and sometimes he doesn’t see one for weeks and his heart rate accelerates when he has to listen to Bond throw himself into danger yet again, because he doesn’t know if he’ll survive this time.) Q knew that Eve would shoot Bond months before the fact, from her phantom’s pacing throughout the building; he also knew that Bond wasn’t dead the moment he saw him in M’s office in the emergency headquarters, where he couldn’t possibly have been before. Everyone took Q’s indifference as detachment, and as with the illusion of the all-knowing god, he doesn’t contradict them because it does rather work in his favour.

(Occasionally it had seemed like Eve didn’t buy his supposed distance, just as he thinks he saw her eyes narrow when he failed to react sufficiently to the news of Bond’s survival.)

(Sometimes he catches Bond trying to follow his line of sight, and has to concede that these people do work in Intelligence for a reason.)

Q hates flying because of the layers upon layers of echoes, all moving and talking and existing at once (never mind when he knows the plane will explode _some day_ ); the Tube isn’t much better, given what can happen there at night. Travelling in general is something he loathes: MI6 and even London are familiar, with well-worn patterns and faces he can expect and a history that takes barely a moment to research. As soon as he steps outside that, he’s on his own.

(They order him to Venice once. He enjoys the sixteenth-century carnival very much; the sight of a certain agent heaving himself out of the water, gasping and more vulnerable than Q will ever see him in the present, far less so.)

Time-viewing means Q has access to secrets – an inside-line on reality, if you want to be ridiculous about it. (Q doesn’t have much patience for poetry.) However, they’re personal secrets. If he wanted, he could turn a pretty business for himself – he already has done, back before he realised the significance of the woman who kept appearing across from him in his favourite café and _looking_ at him. However – and here is a huge reason why he doesn’t say a word, since he has no doubt that M or Bill or Eve or Bond would stare at him in utter despair – he just isn’t interested.

The moment Q started using a computer, he stopped seeing people as the real power. He isn’t interested in gossip; he’s interested in the beautiful simplicity that controls everything these days. (You can’t get time-echoes online; only people leave those sorts of traces.) Seeing the past or the future is aggravatingly useless when you don’t know which is which. Besides, he rather likes to focus on the present. He’s contrary that way. (Proud of it.)

One day, he knows, he’ll stop seeing an older Bond as anything but the past. One day Eve will fade into the background (not before she sits behind a rather different desk, though, and that will never fail to make Q smile), and a new M will walk past the shadows of those that came before. One day these ghosts are just going to remind him of what’s already passed: the closest thing to an interest in people’s presents he’s had in years.

(He sees their pasts and he sees their futures: who the fuck cares about where they are right this second?)

(Bond is in the firing range; Eve is grabbing lunch from the deli ‘round the corner; Bill is smoking on the roof like it’s a secret and M is arguing with the PM in his office.)

“It always makes me feel a little melancholy,” he’d said to Bond, not even lying. _The Fighting Temeraire_ , for him, is about more than the grand old warship being towed away into the sunset, resplendent but dependent on its successor: there’s that moon in the top left corner, with all its worthy reflections. Death and rebirth, past and future, all together in the same picture. When he first saw it as a child, Q realised it was the closest image he might ever find for the worldview he’s been forced into: past glories and present death and future succession all in one place at once. And yes, that does make him feel melancholy, because the sight of the future only reminds him that everything changes and in a few years nobody will care that there were warships or a secret agent named Bond (James Bond) (how many times has he repeated that phrase in HQ alone?), let alone that M’s private secretary once drove into the field herself or the sheer amount of times that the world might have ended if not for them.

He’s heard it said regarding rather different contexts, but Q still thinks it’s relevant: being the observer cuts you off from the action. When his mind turns this way, it turns towards them.

Computers encourage detachment. Q allows himself enough of an ego to push his way into and through security systems, but in the end, he just needs a title that has nothing to do with him. He’s used several hacker nicknames in the past, and ‘Q’ is just one more. No past or present down there. Perhaps that’s why he can get so attached to the few people he does connect with up here.

(Q’s never been _pursued_ the way he has been by Bond, no matter how much that has to do with his refusal to give way to the same compliments and innuendos he’s heard through these hallways a thousand times. It’s as novel as the way Eve can surprise an answering flirtation out of him with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a perfect white-toothed smile.)

Q can’t see his own future, and his past consists of what he can recall himself.

(Does he give in to Bond? Does he end up with Eve? He’s sufficiently aware of the nature of the mess this organisation makes of people’s minds that knowing the two find each other at some point isn’t any answer at all.)

Q makes his own choices, so in a sense he’s the most independent, self-determined person he knows. Maybe it would be nice to know something for certain about his own future, beyond the people who’ll wander through his life or those who will replace him some day; but it’s probably good to have something outside of the virtual world which he can keep entirely in the present.

(Possibly it’s childish to consider the uncertainty of his own life as a wonderful ‘fuck you’ to whatever or whoever decided this would be a good idea. But he’s got a life and a wealth of choices he could make, and maybe it would be nice to pass that on.)

It’s trite and it’s cliché and it’s the final reason why Q keeps this entirely to himself, because superpowers might be impressive for the moment but embarrassment lasts forever.

“The only time that really matters is now.”

(This is one thing of which Q can be certain: he is never going to forgive himself for thinking that.)

( _Ever_.)


End file.
